Jennifer Hunt is the James Cullen Chair in Economics and Professor of Economics at Rutgers University. From 2013-2015, while on leave from Rutgers, she served as the first Chief Economist of the U.S. Department of Labor, then as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Microeconomic Analysis at the U.S. Department of the Treasury. Prior to joining Rutgers in 2011, she held positions at McGill University, the University of Montreal and Yale University. Hunt is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London. Her current research focuses on immigration and wage inequality, while past research has also encompassed unemployment, the science and engineering workforce, the transition from communism, crime and corruption. She received her Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard and her Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


She joined IZA as a Research Fellow in October 1999.